Multiheaded comments on How to Build a Community - Less Wrong

13 Post author: peter_hurford 15 May 2013 05:43AM

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Comment author: Multiheaded 16 May 2013 08:41:55PM *  1 point [-]

Well, personally, I don't see a need to engage in further ethical debate in you. Personally, I wish you'd be unable to scrub these images from your mind for a week or two. That you'd imagine the faces of your family on them, perhaps. "Detached" and "objective" debate has its limits when we're talking about the human consequences of some things while staying in guaranteed safety from them.

[TRIGGER WARNING: TORTURE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE]

For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured.” Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.

...

One of the first things Ms De Witt heard from a cell after her arrest was a man being beaten to death in the yard outside. She said: "They were beating him with what seemed like long chains. I can still hear the noise it made, and then the crying of the young man, eventually it stopped. I saw him later. His whole body was swollen. It was red and blue, and you could not recognise his face. His name was Cedomil Lauzic."

Ms De Witt was put through the ritual of electric shocks, beatings and sexual degradation. "One day I was tortured from 11 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon with electric shocks. Near the end I could not breathe and my heart stopped. They massaged my heart, and they stopped hurting me for that day. But it began again the next morning," she said.

[END TW]

Ain't enough dust specks on this Earth for some things. Intellectual acquiescence with certain ideas should not, I believe, be a matter of relaxed and pleasant debate - no more so than the implementation of them was for their victims.

P.S.: name ONE person tortured or violently repressed by the Allende government. That's right, zero. Allende wouldn't suspend the constitution and the legal norms even in the face of an enemy with no such qualms.

Harmer shows that Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience. He had an ‘unbending commitment to constitutional government’ and refused in the face of an ‘externally funded’ opposition ‘to take a different non-democratic or violent road’. He invoked history to insist that democracy and socialism were compatible, yet he knew that Chile’s experience was exceptional. During the two decades before his election, military coups had overthrown governments in 12 countries: Cuba in 1952; Guatemala and Paraguay in 1954; Argentina and Peru in 1962; Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and again Guatemala in 1963; Brazil and Bolivia in 1964; and Argentina once more in 1966. Many of these coups were encouraged and sanctioned by Washington and involved subverting exactly the kind of civil-society pluralism – of the press, political parties and unions – that Allende promoted. So he was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and respected Castro, especially after he survived the CIA’s Bay of Pigs exploit in 1961. And when Allende won the presidency, he relied on Cuban advisers for personal security and intelligence operations.

But Cuba’s turn to one-party authoritarianism only deepened Allende’s faith in the durability of Chilean democracy. Socialism could be won, he insisted, through procedures and institutions – the ballot, the legislature, the courts and the media – that historically had been dominated by those classes most opposed to it. Castro warned him that the military wouldn’t abide by the constitution. Until at least early 1973 Allende believed otherwise. His revolution would not be confronted with the choice that had been forced on Castro: suspend democracy or perish. But by mid-1973, events were escaping Allende’s command. On 11 September he took his own life, probably with a gun Castro gave him as a gift. The left in the years after the coup developed its own critique of Allende: that, as the crisis hurtled toward its conclusion, he proved indecisive, failing to arm his supporters and train resistance militias, failing to shut down congress and failing to defend the revolution the way Castro defended his. Harmer presents these as conscious decisions, stemming from Allende’s insistence that neither one-party rule nor civil war was an acceptable alternative to defeat.

Comment author: glomerulus 16 May 2013 09:13:05PM 9 points [-]

Multiheaded, you're taking the disutility of each torture caused by Pinochet and using their sum to declare his actions as a net evil. OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.

You, however, appear to be looking at his actions, declaring them evil, and citing Allende as evidence that Pinochet's ruthlessness was unnecessary. This could be the foundation of a good argument, perhaps, but it's not made clear and is instead obscured behind an appeal to emotions, declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 May 2013 09:30:05PM *  4 points [-]

OrphanWilde seems to acknowledge that his actions were terrible, but makes the statement that the frequency of tortures, each with more or less equal disutility (whatever massive quantity that may be), were overall reduced by his actions.

He doesn't actually make that statement anywhere that I can see.

declaring OrphanWilde evil for thinking rationally about events that you think are too repulsive for a rational framework.

I disagree that he has done anything of the sort. What's he even comparing Pinochet to? The obvious candidate is a peacefully elected president after the end of Allende's term, which suggests someone from UP or the Christian Democrats, and it's hard to imagine such a government sponsoring systemic torture against dissidents.

In any case, I think claims of "rational" (which Multiheaded hasn't made anyway) needs to stay far, far away from this thread.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 16 May 2013 09:47:57PM 1 point [-]

To head off an interpretation argument, that's a fair rephrasing of my position. I wouldn't use the word "utility," but the basic moral premise is the same: As bad as Pinochet was, I think he was one of the best options the country had at the time.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 May 2013 09:59:33PM 0 points [-]

On the bright side, we now know how little the torture of over twenty-five thousand is worth to you.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 17 May 2013 01:57:03AM 4 points [-]

Yes. It's worth at least the prevention of the torture of fifty thousand.

Guerrilla warfare against the new government began the same month as the coup - the very next day, in point of fact. At that point I think civil war was inevitable. (And yes, the coup itself was inevitable. Even the judiciary supported it. This might have something to do with the fact that their insistence on following the law resulted in Allende's administration effectively calling the justices of the nation capitalist lapdogs. Yes, I paraphrase.)

The population of Chile was 10 million. There were fewer than 30,000 political prisoners, and around 5,000 deaths (including military and guerrilla forces killed in combat). And yes, a lot of those political prisoners were tortured.

There were other major conflicts in the area in the same era.

Somewhere north of 10,000 died in Argentina in this time frame in the "Dirty War."

The civil war in El Salvador cost around 75,000 lives, out of a population of somewhere south of 5 million people.

The civil war in Guatemala cost somewhere north of 150,000 lives, out of a population of around 4 million people.

Nicaragua faced -two- civil wars, for a combined death toll of at least 40,000, out of a population of around 3 million people.

I could keep going.

Pinochet was an asshole. But if the other conflicts in the region in the era are any indication, his administration, as oppressive as it was, did save the country from a far more costly conflict. In general the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally - such as Argentina and Chile - suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn't or couldn't, such as Nicaragua. (Guatemala initially didn't, but turned far more brutal later.) More, his administration concluded itself peacefully, democratically, and without substantive corruption, which also ran against the norm (for comparison, see, for example, Bolivia). (Note that there -was- corruption -during- his administration. My point there is that he didn't try to corrupt the new government as it formed, and indeed appears to have done a very good job of passing the torch.)

Yes. I think the man did more good than evil. It's a well-considered position and not one I entered into lightly. This doesn't mean the torture of thousands of people doesn't matter; they do. Rather, it means that the lives of tens of thousands of people who -didn't- die matter also.

Comment author: TimS 17 May 2013 02:11:25AM 4 points [-]

It's really hard to disentangle local causation of suffering from external meddling. It seems like an obvious fact to me that there would have been less suffering in the third world if the US and the USSR hadn't been keeping score based on who had successfully couped / repressed a third world country's government more recently.

Cf. Twilight Struggle (which is an amazing game, btw).

Comment author: [deleted] 17 May 2013 04:39:36AM *  3 points [-]

More or less what I was going to say, with the addendum that the civil wars OW brings up -- with the exception of Argentina -- are not in the same reference class. In the 1970's Argentina had a population of over 20 million, making its death rate the same, if not less, than Chile's.

El Salvador's troubles were brought on by a border dispute; Guatemala's number includes a genocide of their indigenous Mayan people. The last three take place in countries with much higher population density and a much more severe history of political and economic instability. Chile's economy does not run entirely on sugar, coffee, bananas and coke.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 17 May 2013 05:50:21PM 3 points [-]

Argentina's policies were very similar to Chile's; they, like Pinochet's Chile, killed thousands of revolutionaries in a brutal and oppressive offensive (notice that I made note of this in the comment). If you're wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.

(Note that I'm not particularly a fan of Argentina's series of dictators, whose administrations inevitably ended in death or coup.)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 May 2013 08:48:08PM 0 points [-]

If you're wanting to say Pinochet made the wrong decision because another country did better, Argentina is -not- the country to compare to.

Nothing in my previous comment says this. Yawn.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 May 2013 03:21:49AM 2 points [-]

the trend was for countries that quashed revolutionary forces brutally - such as Argentina and Chile - suffered far fewer deaths overall than countries that didn't or couldn't, such as Nicaragua.

And what about, um, you know, the logic of MY side in all this? The logic of the Left? Wherever third-world revolutionaries have turned to all the things they're accused of doing, their rationale has always been to prevent the deaths and misery that were going on without any overt civil war, through the "normal" functioning of divided societies. So how is this different from Maoists claiming that, as under Mao's rule life expectancy in China doubled, history has absolved him of everything?

Mark Twain wrote quite glowingly:

the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal-wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

The question is, can we at all justify throwing away the moral injunctions of our civilization by arguing from some clever total-utilitarian counterfactuals, with the track records of such approaches being what it is? I think no, and I think that if you'd say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 17 May 2013 02:37:37PM *  4 points [-]

Something feels wrong about the comparison Mark Twain made. I'll try to explain by an example:

When my country was officially a socialist country, we didn't have mobile phones. Shortly after the regime changed, mobile phones were invented, and now everyone has them. -- Yet I don't consider this an evidence that somehow socialism and mobile phones are opposed. It simply happened. In a counterfactual universe, my country would be socialist today and have mobile phones, too. If I try to make an argument about how socialism relates to the mobile phones, it is not fair to compare past and present. It would be fair only to compare the present and the counterfactual present... assuming such comparison can be made. (For example, I could argue that in the counterfactual universe people in my country probably have less mobile phones, because central planning would probably decide that a smaller number of mobile phones is enough. But of course someone could argue they have more and better mobile phones, because of, uhm, something. Or that having less mobile phones, and perhaps more of something else, is better.)

Similarly, to morally evaluate a revolution, we should not compare it with the past, but with the counterfactual universe where the revolution did not happen. Yeah, it might be impossible. That does not make comparison with the past a correct one -- only as much as the past is reliable as a model of the counterfactual present.

Because, if we take comparing with past as our moral guide, here is my advice for all wannabe dictators: -- Make your revolution just after a significant invention in agriculture or medicine! Then, assuming you are competent enough, all the people you killed will be balanced by the people saved by the improved agriculture or medicine. And the history will consider you the benefactor of humankind. (And a promoter of modern technology.)

Of course that's an example why comparing with past can be misleading. Talking about dictators who kill people and forcefully introduce agricultural or medical improvements which wouldn't have otherwise happened, that would be a different topic. (But only if you make sure the improvements did not happen in the counterfactual universe.)

Comment author: Desrtopa 17 May 2013 03:37:23AM 7 points [-]

I think no, and I think that if you'd say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.

Regardless of whether or not I agree with his position here, I think this is an unfair standard to set.

If you chose a 90% chance of saving 500 people over a 100% chance of saving 400, got unlucky, and those 500 died, how forgiving do you think their families would be? Do you think it would be easy to face them?

I don't think this sort of moral lever is very useful for separating good choices from bad ones.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 May 2013 03:43:33AM 2 points [-]

Do you think it would be easy to face them?

No. But I still would. And I'd let them take it all out on me. I'd hate to live in a world where anything less could be expected of me. Some things ought not to be easy to live with.

"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword."

Comment author: TimS 17 May 2013 04:20:06PM 6 points [-]

"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword."

That rule literally makes sense only because of scope insensitivity or similar bias. There's no reason to expect a rationalist to adopt it within a community of rationality.

In other words, maybe instrumentally useful, not terminal value.

Comment author: Desrtopa 17 May 2013 04:06:55AM 6 points [-]

If we make the right choice as or more difficult to live with than wrong ones, we're not doing a very good job incentivizing people to take it.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 17 May 2013 04:13:34AM 3 points [-]

The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn't have been tortured if Pinochet hadn't been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.

Why don't you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn't been dictator? (Note: I don't seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you're capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)

Comment author: [deleted] 17 May 2013 04:32:50AM 2 points [-]

(Note: I don't seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you're capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)

The irony has completely gone off the charts.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 May 2013 04:39:38AM -1 points [-]

The idea that twenty five thousand people wouldn't have been tortured if Pinochet hadn't been a dictator is itself a counterfactual.

Then how the fuck does it not nullify your counterfactual that they would've been tortured?
I can back up my claims with historical evidence about the lawful and peaceful character of Allende's government - as well as the enormous support and protection given to Pinochet and his ilk by the US, without which he would've been way less likely to succeed.
You just assert the opposite, that the US-backed dictators and their pet psychopaths were: 1) the only solution to violence and strife in the region, and 2) not at all a major contributing factor to said strife and violence. I say it's bullshit and shameless propaganda.

Why don't you explain to those victims how their lives would have been better if Pinochet hadn't been dictator?

I'm really quite confident that many of the survivors brought that up over and over again - in interviews and when testifying after Pinochet's belated arrest and trial.

What, do you think that me, hypothetically, telling a victim/their family: "I looked you up, and I'm so sorry for what happened to you, I wish Pinochet never got his hands on anyone"... is somehow as fucked up as what you could possibly tell them, if Omega forced us both to explain ourselves to them?

(Note: I don't seriously advocate you dredge up painful memories for somebody just to prove some sort of political point about how right your political views are because you're capable of not giving a shit about their suffering.)

Hey, any Chileans on LW?

Comment author: shminux 16 May 2013 10:17:29PM 3 points [-]

Get off the trolley track or be consequentialized.

Comment author: Multiheaded 16 May 2013 10:30:04PM 0 points [-]

Get off the guill- ...no, I'd rather not go there. But LW has definitely been tempting me as of late.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 May 2013 10:30:44PM 0 points [-]

I love paralepsis!

Comment author: Juno_Watt 28 May 2013 11:12:14AM 1 point [-]

As bad as Pinochet was, I think he was one of the best options the country had at the time.

It's sill odd to be a "huge fan" of someone you can only defend as the lesser of two evils.

Comment author: Multiheaded 16 May 2013 09:38:55PM *  0 points [-]

Yep, I admit there's two arguments. My secondary line of attack is that there was nothing "necessary" about the things Pinochet did, and that in regards to the rule of law and sustainable democracy he wrecked what Allende was trying to create.

But my primary line is that some "rational" arguments should be simply censored when their advocates don't even bother with hypotheticals but point to the unspeakable experiences of real victims and then dismiss them as a fair price for some dubious greater good. This is a behavior and an attitude that our society needs to suppress, I believe, because it's predictive of other self-centered, remorseless, power-blind attitudes - and we're better off with fully general ethical injunctions against such. Not tolerating even the beginning steps of some potentially devastating paths is important enough to outweigh perfect epistemic detachment and pretensions to impartiality.

Christian moralism in its 19th century form - once a popular source for such injunctions - is rightly considered obsolete/bankrupt, but, like Orwell, I think our civilization needs a replacement for it. Or else our descendants might be the ones screaming "Why did it have to be rats?!" one day.

ZERO compromise. Not for the sake of politeness, not for the sake of pure reason, not a single more step to hell.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 May 2013 09:44:40PM 1 point [-]

I completely agree with you.

Comment author: MugaSofer 23 May 2013 04:34:46PM *  2 points [-]

Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just ... damn.

Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren't going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I'm not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience's rationality, I'm inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.

Comment author: MugaSofer 24 May 2013 10:05:13AM *  5 points [-]

Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I've just been karmassasinated and so I'll put it here instead.

Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.

As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it's justified - I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!

I'm well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it's even easier when you're relying on outrage rather than rationality.

Finally, it's interesting that you claim it's OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that's covered in applause lights. Isn't truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn't break just because the expected utility is so high?

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 May 2013 01:15:25PM 2 points [-]

So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost.

Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?

Comment author: MugaSofer 27 May 2013 10:34:57AM *  2 points [-]

Not yet (to my knowledge.)

Maybe someday, if we manage to raise the sanity waterline enough, and if everyone who tries it doesn't get denounced as giving aid an comfort to the Enemy for even considering the idea.

EDIT: Possible example:

You should never, ever murder an innocent person who's helped you, even if it's the right thing to do; because it's far more likely that you've made a mistake, than that murdering an innocent person who helped you is the right thing to do.

Sound reasonable?

During World War II, it became necessary to destroy Germany's supply of deuterium, a neutron moderator, in order to block their attempts to achieve a fission chain reaction. Their supply of deuterium was coming at this point from a captured facility in Norway. A shipment of heavy water was on board a Norwegian ferry ship, the SF Hydro. Knut Haukelid and three others had slipped on board the ferry in order to sabotage it, when the saboteurs were discovered by the ferry watchman. Haukelid told him that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman immediately agreed to overlook their presence. Haukelid "considered warning their benefactor but decided that might endanger the mission and only thanked him and shook his hand." (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.) So the civilian ferry Hydro sank in the deepest part of the lake, with eighteen dead and twenty-nine survivors. Some of the Norwegian rescuers felt that the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this attitude did not prevail, and four Germans were rescued. And that was, effectively, the end of the Nazi atomic weapons program.

-Ethical Injuctions

Comment author: Multiheaded 23 May 2013 06:25:34PM *  -2 points [-]

Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly, terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.

Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it's only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good - but still, wouldn't you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?

And no, I'm not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to "manipulate" you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through "emotional" appeals.

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."

Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?

Comment author: nshepperd 23 May 2013 07:07:13PM 0 points [-]

And no, I'm not sorry for exposing you to such content.

What the fuck? Causing unnecessary psychological damage to anyone reading this page—even more so just for the sake of some stupid political point—is not acceptable. Downvoted.

Comment author: Multiheaded 23 May 2013 07:29:15PM 2 points [-]

I'm not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.

Comment author: nshepperd 24 May 2013 05:08:57PM *  1 point [-]

I don't care who has what bullshit political opinions here. No-one gave you the authority to emotionally traumatize the readers of this site "for the greater good". Especially when you could have even just added a trigger warning to the top of your post and it would not have diminished your argument in the slightest. Frankly, if you're going to be a dick you don't need to be here.

Comment author: Multiheaded 24 May 2013 05:24:31PM 2 points [-]

OK, I'm adding a TW, but I'm not going to abridge or rot13 it.

Comment author: nshepperd 26 May 2013 02:29:52PM 1 point [-]

Thank you. That's a sufficient improvement.

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